Police review board is ready

A board of citizens appointed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino more than six months ago to review citizen complaints of police misconduct is ready to begin taking cases.

The three-member panel named in January has received training on police procedures with a focus on use-of-force guidelines. The Police Department has hired a liaison who will handle case flow and communication with complainants. Citizens can ask the board to look into complaints starting this week.

The panel's activation ends a long battle by community leaders who fought for an independent body to review allegations against police, and many hailed it as a beginning.

But it is also being criticized as weak and too entwined with the Police Department to be truly independent. The board cannot conduct its own investigations or field citizen complaints that have not first gone through police. The panel's headquarters is in the Internal Affairs Division of the Police Department.

The board will automatically review cases that allege serious police misconduct. The Internal Affairs Division is determining which cases are serious enough to warrant automatic review. Because of confidentiality agreements required by police lawyers, board members are banned from speaking publicly about the cases they do review.

"It was supposed to be transparent and not even have the perception there might be some favoritism," said Jorge Martinez, executive director of Dorchester nonprofit Project RIGHT.

City officials characterize establishment of the current board as a starting point that can be modified, but acknowledge that the board's powers have been constrained by union opposition and legal considerations.

"It's a step forward," said William F. Sinnott, the city's chief lawyer who has spearheaded formation of the board since he came to work for the city in March 2006. "That's the most important thing. We want this program to work."

For more than a decade, community leaders have been calling for a robust and independent board of citizens to investigate allegations of police misconduct. Those calls gained urgency after the fatal police shooting of 21-year-old Victoria Snelgrove at a Red Sox victory celebration in 2004. At the time, former police commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole commissioned a $40,000 study by Northeastern University to examine citizen review boards nationwide and recommend an appropriate model for Boston.

Jack McDevitt, who heads the university's Institute on Race and Justice, delivered his recommendations to City Hall about a year later, and last August the mayor announced the creation of the panel now in place.

Starting this week, citizens who are unhappy with the results of an Internal Affairs investigation of their complaint can appeal to the new board to review the Internal Affairs case file. If the board concludes that a case needs further investigating, it can ask Internal Affairs to reopen the case. If the board is still not satisfied after that, it can notify the police commissioner.

The members are John F. O'Brien, a dean at New England School of Law, David Hall, former dean and now a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, and Ruth Suber, a retiree and former Parole Board member.

Boston's approach to citizen oversight differs considerably from that in some other cities, most notably Atlanta, where a police shooting of an 88-year-old woman in November prompted the creation -- in a mere eight months, compared with nearly three years in Boston -- of an 11-member board appointed mostly by neighborhood, business, and legal groups.

The Atlanta panel receives complaints directly from citizens, conducts its own investigations, and has the power to subpoena witnesses and documents.

"It was not easy, I'll tell you," said Councilman H. Lamar Willis, who pushed through a law creating the Atlanta board, despite opposition from the mayor, lawyers, and police union.

Willis said he pushed for the board's creation at numerous community meetings and enlisted victims of police misconduct to voice their support and tell their stories. "It became enough of a groundswell to force this to happen," Willis said.

Howard Friedman, a civil rights lawyer in Boston, predicted that unless the city's panel is made more independent, it will fail, as did an earlier board formed in 1992 after an independent commission found rampant incompetence in police investigations of officer misconduct. It was criticized for being biased toward police and City Hall and fell apart shortly after it was formed.

"It's exactly what happened last time," said Friedman who worked with the previous board. "It'll be a nonstarter, it won't get used, and gradually, it will dissolve."

McDevitt said yesterday that he has offered to help Boston modify the board's structure and expand its powers if needed.

Like many community leaders, McDevitt said he is happy to have something in place. "It's good for the city," he said. "We'll tweak around the edges and make it as good as it can be."

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.